What is pretty clear, as you stated, is that Microsoft doesn’t really care about the life of a developer. Basically any tool, like Notepad++, will do much better than Visual C++ as editor. It probably just needs (if doesn’t already have) a plugin with a compile button and some small tree view of the files. That’s it.

The problem is that you need technical people (or at least people who got a clue) to guide a company. Take Ballmer, he probably barely knows what C++ is, what does he care what your editor looks or feels like? Nothing. But you are, as a developer, a very important wheel in the machinery which brings money to Microsoft. If you have better tools, you will work better, produce better code. If you have a better ecosystem for you app, your app and your users will benefit from it and this will reflect very good on Windows, because the same app will work better on Windows than on, say, OSX. On the other hand if you ignore as a CEO what C++ is, you can’t have vision, which is the first quality a CEO needs. You will neglect developers, which then i turn will be frustrated, which may result in their decision not to partecipate in any technology you dish out. That’s my case for instance. I don’t know how WinPhone8 will be (although I have an idea), but just based on my discontent with Microsoft I can tell you that if I had to buy a mobile phone my choice would be:

1 – Android
2 – iPhone
3 – Blackbarry
4 – Used MeeGo
5 – Symbian
6 – * wildcard standing for ANY DAMN PHONE BUT NOT A WINDOWS PHONE
7- WinPhone 8

I will not endorse Microsoft in any of their delusions.

@anon imus: I’m not a gamer myself, so I don’t really care about Steam, but that doesn’t count since there are lots of people who do use it and that was really the subject of my case. :)

I don’t know if you are obliged to give answers to your shareholders, in any case you’re obliged to give professional answers to who believed in you, buying your products (user & developers), develop for your platforms and so on.
I’ve just download VS2012 express.
1) Aside the missing resizable build window from VS (at least from Vs6.0) as you said, what I have to highlight is the missing of a silly feature, very very silly feature but useful from my point of view. The editor window is missing the italic style for code comments!!! Unbelievable. Well, someone could say that this is a very particular feature from a 50millions lines of code of a complex software. Well/2, first of all this a little feature that is missing from VS6.0. Second, many many editors have this feature and this shows, at least from a statistical point of view, that viewing comments in italic style from you code could make your 8 hours (at least 8 hours ) daily professional life as coders a little better.
2) I’ve been reading Josuttis second edition book and I’ve trying his examples on VS2012. What I’ve found suddenly is the missing initializer list feature :o. So the first thing that came into my mind is that perhaps C++ last standard was released lately, one or two months ago…no! was released on August the 11th (from wikipedia). Well I said to myself, perhaps Microsoft hasn’t allocated too many people for the C++ standard library update. Surely, the other compilers haven’t done any yet, so I tried a little search on the web and I came to this table….
http://www.cpprocks.com/a-comparison-of-c11-language-support-in-vs2012-g-4-7-and-clang-3-1/
The table could be wrong, I don’t know for sure.
Anyway, the only compiler, from the three, that is missing the most feature from C++ standard is…. VC11! Hey hey, stop a while: did you notice Microsoft has changed the graphical layout for Vs6.0 …to… Vs2012 for each version of it released? Wow I’ve noticed that!! wait, how could I possibly earn money from looking the VS series layouts?!?!

So silly questions I asked to my self are:
Has Microsoft been doing all efforts, and more during these years, to keep their products as much “strong” from the quality/dev’s work etc. as possible?
Wasn’t sufficient to release just SPs for VS as new bugs were discovered and fixed /features implemented and so on INSTEAD of ship a new product every 5 minutes
exchanging it as new big STEP in technologies of human beings?
Have they spend more on marketing instead to concentrate on their products and quality of their products?
And fundamentally, have they asked to devs what REALLY they need? Or they prefer to guide the market based on their idea of what is better? (Monopoly?)

My considerations:
As you said, Daniel, when I sit down in front of my pc on work I need products that run and do their jobs well, possibly with features that help ME as software developer.
I don’t want to go to my office and sit down in front of my PC looking for hours how beauty is the graphical layout of the next Visual Studio (the effort spent to do that instead to allocate resources to update C++ standard library for example).
I don’t what to go see any flickering effects on my program (with Windows 7 basic) on a 3Ghz/4gb ram PC (default win32 project) just because Microsoft decided to move on the next Windows transparent effect.
An these are just few issues…

English is not my first language, let me know if it’s unclear.

Steam is the last thing I want on Linux.

Who’s the dumbass that thinks it’s a good idea to require *AND maintain* an online account for a single player offline game. I won’t touch NewVegas or Skyrim because I don’t want this Steam’ed shit on any machine of mine.

Same reason I won’t play Starcraft II. Why the hell do I need to regularly go online to play an offline game ?

The Witcher is supposed to be DRM free, but right there on the back of the box “requires 50MB download of license file”. 50MB for a license ?

Some of us live in rural areas without blazing speeds of internets. Even if I had broadband at home I still ain’t downloading license shit or going online for an offline game I bought retail.

Well, I won’t argue with your points because they are all true. But. WP7, with dismal market share and without C/C++ compatibility already has more than one hundred thousands apps (!). It’s probably a record if relating to the number of existing phones:)

So, you should not believe in WP7 – it’s already there. Note that I am talking only about one aspect of WP7 – the size of its store, the future of the platform itself is apparently very questionable. But so would be MeeGo’s future.

My personal advice for Nokia would be stick with Android.

Nokia didn’t just pull out of Meego, all the main backers behind Meego pulled out because they didn’t agree where Meego roadmap was going. This is why Tizen was created because Intel, Samsung amongst others wanted a mobile OS to embrace HTML5 at its core. Nokia gave all the Meego patents to Jolla so it isn’t a dead OS just yet and Jolla have got deals with other mobile phone makers to use Meego. I think Nokia is just trying to give itself a clear roadmap for the future and having less financial burden on none core assets which may also partly explain why they sold Qt to Digia. Nokia is moving back to its roots. The probably chose Windows over Android because Android is just so fragmented and currently Windows RT seems to have a good roadmap ahead of itself…

Ted.